"Pat and Mike" (1952) saunters through its 96 minutes with a casual, unassuming air. Exuding the ease of very sophisticated people who've attained the relaxation that comes only from confidence, "Pat and Mike" presents self-assurance as a gift that people give their partners as a result of their complete faith in each other.
So it's no surprise that there are two experienced sets of partners behind "Pat and Mike," writers Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon and stars Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy; the four of them are like perfect charade partners. Taking their cue from Kanin and Gordon's script, Tracy and Hepburn toss off the trickiest exchanges as effortlessly as if they were saying "Pass the cream" at breakfast. Their banter is so gloriously in tune that even when they're completely at odds with each other amid the ruckus of the lunch-time crush at Lindy's, they're on the same wavelength. "Pat and Mike" is a celebration of confidence and competence and comfort -- qualities that were director George Cukor's partners throughout his career -- and here his style reaches a casual apotheosis. The movie is one of the masterpieces of American romantic comedy, but it's so offhand you'd never think to describe it that way. Its perfection is unobtrusive.
Hepburn plays Pat Pemberton, a phys. ed. teacher at a California college and a dumbfoundingly gifted athlete. Or she would be if she didn't turn into a quivering mass of doubt whenever her dullard fiancie, Collier (the oleaginous William Ching), gives her his stricken moo-cow look, a look that says he doesn't really believe she's capable of anything. Determined to get back her confidence, she takes up a management offer from Tracy's Mike Conovan, a sports promoter who's had a gander at Pat when she's operating free of Collier's jinx. Mike knows there's a bushel of money to be made from a lady athlete, but he's also got an eye for talent, and one of the movie's neatest jokes is how Mike's appreciation of Pat's athletic beauty turns to love. This is the movie where Tracy observes of Hepburn, "Not much meat on her, but what's there is cherce."
Mike talks about Pat as just another of his investments -- like his heavyweight contender, a dumbly sweet palooka named Davie Hucko (Aldo Ray in a honey of a performance), or his racehorse Little Nell -- but there's real tenderness in his solicitous care of her. In one great moment, Mike is thinking about Pat while stroking Little Nell, and Cukor superimposes Hepburn's angular patrician features on the horse's mug. That's about as dreamy as Cukor allows the movie to get. Henri Langois said the world of Cukor's movies was one in which "everything is in half-tone, suggested and never over-stressed." The romance here is all implicit. The clinch that seals it consists of Tracy giving Hepburn a firm handshake and saying, "OK, Kid, ya gotta deal."
Setting a movie about learning to trust your instincts in the world of sports is an inspired idea. "Even they don't understand how they do what they do," Mike says about athletes at one point. What he means is that, in athletes, instinct and action are almost inseparable. Like Robert Towne's "Personal Best," "Pat and Mike" is a movie that truly understands that athletes think with their bodies. Cukor's direction reflects that exultation in the physical. In "On Cukor," his delightful book of interviews with the director, Gavin Lambert noted Cukor's penchant, in his early '50s films, for shooting on location, giving his confections some of the same documentary feel that the French new wave directors brought to their films later in the decade.
The long golf championship sequence early in "Pat and Mike" is a great example of this mix of the stylized and the real. One of the sequence's pleasures is the chance to see the great golfer Babe Didrickson Zaharias (Pat's opponent in the match) in action. And it's Hepburn herself, not a double, whom we watch hitting a series of beauties straight down the fairway. Less tangibly, there's also a strolling rhythm to the sequence, the sense of the match unfolding as the crowd and players move from green to green, as if Cukor's camera were simply following life, and doing it with the unhurried sense of curiosity that informs the whole picture.
What has kept "Pat and Mike" so contemporary is its notion of love as an equal proposition. Another film might have depicted Pat as simply exchanging one master for another. But "five-o, five-o" is Mike's version of how things should be, in work and love. "Remember you're the best," he tells Pat, "even if you don't think so, I do." And that's what frees her up to be herself, just as she frees him up, emotionally and professionally ("I never knew there was so much money to be made legitimate," he says). Tracy could sometimes never get beyond his baked-potato lumpiness, but we see him through Hepburn's eyes here.
Mike (and his shady associates) inhabit the stylized street milieu of Damon Runyon, complete with slangy lingo. He and Hepburn are from two different worlds, but one of the marvels of how they play together is how well they communicate, as in this doozy of an exchange where they're slowly accommodating themselves to each other's speech patterns. He: "Well ya done the right thing -- did." She: "What would I have did if you hadn't been around? -- done." Tracy sums up the unlikely pairing in one beautiful line: "An upper-cruster like you and my kinda type that can't even speak left-handed English ... the whole gizmo is hard to believe." This gizmo purrs like a kitten. It's what Cole Porter meant by a perfect blendship.
